a title is required

well the vye-37b which is a more powerful and expensive version of this (vye just rebadge Kohjinsha kit) does have a 5 and a halfish hour battery life when you turn the brightness down. Well once you remove vista anyway. And that's with the 1024x600 res with an a100 800mhz, gig of memory 130gb hard disk and 1gb of memory.

So I can believe that this model can manage a 5 hours life too.

The touch screen is pretty awsome too. The keyboards are also very nice to use. Can't fault em. Well except that the 37b shipped with bricksta

Looks like a relaunch of the Kohjinsha SH1 -- which was rubbish

I had a Kohjinsha SA1 last year, to my regret. (It drank a mug of tea eventually, but that's another matter.) This looks to be a revision of the same machine -- same case, same specification, same OS -- at half the original ($1000) price.

Things you want to know before you try and buy one? The keyboard is nearly the worst I've ever used -- far inferior to the more expensive SH6/SH8 models. The screen is no better than the Eee's (and far inferior to the more expensive SH6 and SH8 models, which sport 1024x600 pixels to the SA5's 800x480).

The SH6 I replaced the SA1 with is a much more civilized machine; slow, but the screen is a delight and the keyboard doesn't feel like they've stuffed a decaying squid under it.

Verdict: assuming I called it right and this is a straight reissue of the SA1, my advice would be "don't touch this with a barge-pole". Wait for the Eee 901, or if you need the disk space and have the money go for an HP MiniNote. This one's a turkey.

back to the vye

the slighlty more meaty older one fits in the front pouch of my backpack. You can use it no problem in the sun with the brightness down, although summer is yet to arrive.

The keyboard is good.

With XP pro the higher spec one is like lightning - you can easily have a half dozen tabs in firefox open, three word documents and winamp going in the background with a massive playlist.

So I'd expect this one to still be rather responsive. Linux would only be more responsive if you spent an age finding an appropriate gui that wasn't full of glam. Of course I turn the memory hungry themes engine off.

Only problem I found was that the hotbuttons app they use for the buttons on the monitor panel messes with directx so when you want a bit of retro gaming you need to kill that.

They're also a nice weight for just holding and reading a document in reading mode.

They also feel pretty sturdy.

As to the beach girl, you ever go to sofmap in Japan they'll have beutiful woman trying to sell you the things there in person.

darned windows tax

Re: The death of the PMP?

When I got my Archos AV500 almost 2.5 years ago I did a test of playing video and got just shy of 6 hours, this extended to about 8 hours when outputting to a tv so the screen wasn't draining power. Now I'm lucky if I get up to 2 hours playback, the battery is work out.

These miniature laptops (legtops? palmtops?) are excellent for playing video because they can play practically any format you throw at them ust by getting the right codecs (which unlike Archos' offerings, won't cost you a penny) but the biggest advantage PMP's still have over laptops is the battery life, PMPs being double that of a laptop, and Cowon trump the lot with their high capacity batteries.

Psion 5mx

@Joe Stalin

Dear Uncle Joe, EVERYTHING in Japan is more expensive than anywhere else, even Japanese made products. So the Japanese price is merely a guide to the actual price elsewhere. Try to get the HK or Singapore price. That will be more realistic !!